More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The fact you are trying to reduce a civil war to ‘she started it’ does not fill me with confidence,”
Deran Wu said. “It’s the end of civilization as we know it. And it’s going to be great for business.”
Kiva was extremely self-interested. Senia thought that was neither good nor bad, but Kiva was of a different mind about that. She thought it was pretty much the only way to be in a universe that didn’t care about anyone’s life one way or another, and in a civilization that was designed to keep the rich as rich as possible and the poor from actively starving so they wouldn’t think to rise up and behead the rich. An uncaring universe and a fundamentally static civilization would smother anyone who didn’t keep themselves and their own concerns front and center.
She was just a speck of animated carbon that would be eternally inanimate soon enough, so might as well go ahead and have another muffin, or lay that cute redhead, or whatever.
Either she was going to have to become less fundamentally selfish, or she was going to have to find a way to make others less so.
As far as Kiva could tell, whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages: Denial. Denial. Denial. Fucking Denial. Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.
The second reason was that the ruling class of the Interdependency, favoring financial and social stability over having the lumpenproletariat trying to rip their heads from their necks at every opportunity, opted to have the Interdependency’s baseline standard of living one where no one starved, or was without shelter, or died of easily preventable diseases or went bankrupt if they had a heart attack or lost a job, or both.
They both came away from the meeting feeling like they had manipulated the other precisely, which meant it was a good meeting.
“Sophistry can be heuristically generated.” “So millennia of college sophomores have taught us, yes.”
